Basketball On The Internet (and other stuff)

— January 26, 2005

I was at work for the first half of the Laker/Sonics game last night, and I had to do something Iâ€™ll do a lot more soon with an East Coast road swing coming up â€” â€œwatchâ€ the game on the Internet.

And I can’t find a good way to do that.

I think Iâ€™m spoiled because baseball has a pretty good system in place â€” the MLB.com flash game track system shows you a lot of detail, including where pitches were in relation to the batter. Itâ€™s not perfect (when there is a fly ball out to Milton Bradley in center field, I donâ€™t know if it came right to him or if he had to make a shoestring catch), but you can follow the game closely.

NBA.comâ€™s flash game tracker isnâ€™t as good. I can get a play-by-play, and a running box score, but there is no feel for the game. ESPNâ€™s site gives you a shot chart but its running play-by-play isnâ€™t nearly as smooth. Iâ€™ll add that I checked, and ESPNâ€™s feed ran a few seconds ahead of the NBA feed when side-by-side.

I admit that part of the problem is the sport â€” itâ€™s much easier to have a computerized play-by-play of baseball because of the pace of the sport and the majority of the action being in one area (at the plate). Iâ€™m not sure how you make it better for basketball.

Does anyone out there have a better system (or site) for â€œwatchingâ€ games live? Itâ€™s one of the West Coast issues, games are going on before I leave the office all the time. I just wish there was a better way to deal with it.

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Two other quick notes this morning:

Maverickâ€™s owner Mark Cuban just rips into ESPNâ€™s Chad Ford in his latest blog entry. Ford has long been a whipping boy on NBA team message boards and blogs around the nation (an honor richly deserved), but when a team owner (especially one as accessible as Cuban) writes that Ford never calls him but writes about what Cuban is doing and thinking, it takes on a whole new level of credibility.

I heard big time Laker fan Ice Cube interviewed by Jim Rome this morning (donâ€™t take this as an endorsement of Rome and his show, itâ€™s not [he could be an entire entry some day], but he is a good interviewer and Cube is a great guest). Ice Cube knew his Lakers and was good with the direction of the team, and he had the quote of the day:

â€œIt was time for a change. This was like a soap opera with bad writers.â€